Missing the Meta Bus

This Week in Popculture’s Cube: Missing the Meta Bus

Those of you who are careful listeners of the podcast or who follow my writing here know one thing for sure: I love EDH.

It’s a fun format. Challenging. Artistic. Highly conceptual.

When I think about Magic, I think about EDH. When I look at a particular card, I think of how it’ll fit as a singleton in a delightful Commander deck. My mind runs on EDH when it comes to Magic.

And I recently discovered something: that focus on EDH has completely handicapped me. Completely.

I was recently on the podcast again with Daemon and Blades, and the topic was Burn vs. Aggro. Among the discussions during the show were those particular decks in the present meta.

If you didn’t notice, I was… pretty quiet during that part of the show. And there’s a reason for that.

When you work in the world of EDH, you work in the world of antiquity. Maybe, since I have a master’s degree in history and specialized in Ancient History, that’s why EDH appeals to me – you’re delving for ancient things, for hidden logics, for esoteric lore, for combinations that stretch all the way back to Magic’s hoary, antediluvian vastness.
And you don’t necessarily pay attention to any new cards unless they can help a particular deck you’re working on.

I quickly came to realize that – holy moly!!! – I know basically nothing about the good cards in the last couple of sets. I’d forgotten about the combos that work in Journey into Nyx and Khans of Tarkir. Heck, I don’t know ANY combos that work in them.

Part of that, yes, is driven by my EDH addiction. And part of that is driven by the fact that, among the folks I play with, Standard and the current meta isn’t something that’s really hotly pursued. Most of the guys I play against play EDH, they play Modern, etc. They don’t try to keep up with Standard a lot, usually because of the speed, ferocity, and downright dogged cutthroat nature of the format.

Another issue for me is that, flat out, I rarely have the opportunity to play Standard in any organized, competitive way. The nearest Friendly Local Gaming Store (FLGS) in my neck of the woods is 30 minutes away and, given my schedule, I’m not likely to play at an FNM anytime soon. I’ve actually played at 2 FNMs my entire life, and one of those was by accident.

But I WANT to be current, I want to know what’s going on. Which I one of the reasons I’m grateful to the dudes at TheMTGYou. But that’s also why I’m grateful to the larger Magic community. There’re a lot of us out there, all of us struggling with our own Magic issues.

We each have our dragons to slay when it comes to Magic. I know what mine are. I keep missing the Meta Bus. I don’t pay attention to the things I need to in order to win. I often build sloppy decks.